Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are vital subjective data required in most medical diagnoses and treatment. One of the most common PROMs is pain, often referred to as the 5th vital sign (after temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure). The PainPad project was born out of an observation from orthopaedic surgeon Oli Pearce that there was a black hole in his knowledge of each patient from the time they were discharged after surgery until they appeared at their 6 week post-op appointment. He tried having them fill in diaries for pain but the diaries were either ignored, incomplete, or back-filled just before the appointment with a poor recollection of the past 6 weeks.
Blaine and his colleagues quickly built a cheap box with a keypad and small processor that prompted patients to press a button from 0-10 (For their pain score) every 2 hours and transmitted the result over wifi to a secure server. The PainPad was iteratively developed over several years with patient and nurse feedback and is in regular use at Milton Keynes University Hospital. Patients may also use an PainPad app on their smartphone and continue to log pain when they go home.
The PainPad has been used by over 500 patients, most of them having had either a knee or hip replacement. Knowing this was the use case, the PainPad has been designed for use by older adults, however an iPhone and Android app has recently been released and is being used by adults of all ages.
The data collected has led to interesting results, including justifying a surgical technique that is faster and does not result in increased pain after surgery.
Publications:
O2. Price, B. A., Kelly, R., Mehta, V., McCormick, C., Ahmed, H. and Pearce, O. (2018) ‘Feel My Pain: Design and Evaluation of Painpad, a Tangible Device for Supporting Inpatient Self-Logging of Pain’, Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’18, Montreal QC, Canada, ACM Press, pp. 1–13 [Online]. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173743
Patent:
Blaine Price, Oliver Pearce, Vikram Mehta, Ciaran McCormick, Mathew Gascoyne, UK Patent GB2585381 – Pain-level reporting apparatus, device, system and method. https://www.ipo.gov.uk/p-ipsum/Case/PublicationNumber/GB2585381
Our Design Process
